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IGN Review of Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade
That kind of sweeping, determined adventure gaming is common fare on consoles and PC systems, but it's fairly rare in the handheld world. A few RPGs and strategy titles on Game Boy Advance will last you long enough to feel older when you are finished, but most games made for pocket systems barely last longer than it takes to get the wrapper off, and even the substantial ventures draw up short of similar games on consoles. It says a lot for how developers are looking at this new PlayStation handheld and the crowd it might gather that it is attracting a company like Sony Online Entertainment. (This is not, mind you, the same part of Sony that makes PlayStation -- SOE didn't have to make PSP games, just like the company did not have to and decided not to put on PS2 games like PlanetSide and Star Wars: Galaxies.)
However, the production this company put together says other things about the PSP, not all of them things you will want to hear. Even though this game is divorced from the action-RPG series that SOE is best known for on consoles, many gamers still called this portable action-RPG Lil' Champions of Norrath. That sticks to the final game. It's a lite version of a series that you have played before in a heftier dose. The production values are less. The options and customizing choices are slimmer. The design is simpler.
It's a godsend to have such a time-consuming and wearying kind of game in a portable form, but a few corners were trimmed off to make it (or, at least, to make it this early on for PSP.) How much you enjoy this game will probably depend on how well you adjust to PSP's naturally lesser scale. You can't help but yearn for everything you get elsewhere when you experience its console-quality graphics and extensive quest, but you also revel in the fact that you have such an extensive and compelling venture that you can stash in your backpack. Where this game draws up big is in capturing the traditional action-RPG gameplay that classics like Baldur's Gate and Champions of Norrath brought us. A portable is the perfect system for the occasional dungeon crawl, and this PSP game offers upwards of 100 levels to set your questing heart off on its journey. Control handling on the PSP is as smooth as a sharpened blade through an unshielded orc belly. The PSP's analog control disc feels comfortable for hours of gameplay, and this game doesn't require the precision of other games that have had trouble adjusting to this unique controller. SOE has done a fine job simplifying the complex controls this genre requires down with the help of one common toggle button -- hold down the R trigger for a second function of any button on the PSP controller. The X button, for example, will attack, but quickly hold down the trigger and tap X to switch your weapon in the middle of a heated battle. A few minor annoyances aside (it's damned hard reaching over to the D-Pad to quick-select a magic attack when dozens of bloodthirsty demons are on your fleeing ass and you can't take your thumb off the analog nub), the gameplay is all there at your fingertips for you to lose yourself in.
The power of the PlayStation Portable allowed the development team to make this game an overwhelming, visceral experience. Most often, you will only be battling through two or three enemies at a time, but when the game wants to get mean, it can fill up the screen with beasts. Gigantic ent creatures that tower over the forest and dwarf the PSP's widescreen view. Hulking rhino beasts that crush into you ceaselessly as you pound away on their hard armored skin. Cunning skeleton archers that drive bolts into you from afar while you are tied up battling other creatures. And small armies of imps and spiders that swam and surround you. Getting ambushed as you come around a corner by four or more enemies is not uncommon, and if you try to race through a stage and hope you can outrun the masses, you may find yourself with as many enemies charging after you on the screen as you can count.
Most of the enemies you encounter are straight-away skullbashers, but this action-RPG genre has always been saddled with the term "button masher", and the team behind Untold Legends does its best to combat this with variety. Ghosts will blink in and out of existence as you are fighting, while conjurers sometimes created living bomb creatures that explode when they come into contact with their enemy. Some of the higher-level creatures (particularly the frequent mini-bosses) have unique techniques -- one creature that had the old platforming jump-quake ripple attack was particularly memorable, as you really had to use the block button and mix up your moves to battle him. These kinds of encounters are few and far between, unfortunately. On the other hand, projectile-firing enemies are swarming the Untold Legends catacombs, and they have enough AI to know when to fight you and when to flee and regroup.
The four available character types are a good mix of various skills, although this is where the game starts to step lightly instead of taking full strides as on consoles. Knights (as always) are the traditional fighter class, but their special attacks feature tons of combo moves and can dual-wield weapons. Druids can conjure bizarre companion monsters (who lure enemies and bear much of the brunt of their attacks) and have a host of spells to cast. Alchemist use even deeper magic over curious spells, like a Fire Bomb grenade, Chain Lightning, and the Mind Wrack for turning enemies into your drone soldiers. Berzerkers are the fast and wild battlers, with sprinting and lunging special moves that charge in and go crazy (which is complimented by some cool animations on this feral species -- I love how they spin their bodies around to throw weapons.) All have abilities that can boost abilities and healing of players questing with them, and between all of the choices that you have in leveling up your character allow you to make a uniquely skilled character for when you go into battle with other players over wireless link play.
On the other hand, those choices are a lot more limited than an action-RPG veteran might expect. Out of the four classes, you may only find enough differences to fill two different classes -- Druids and Alchemsists are similar magic users, just as Knights and Berzerkers two types of fighting styles. And Untold Legends also gives you only a handful of character designj choices. while in most games, you would be petty to bitch about not having enough cosmetic options, this is a must in an RPG. Instead of the full color wheel for skintone and hair color, you have a choice of four or five simple styles. You can't even choose the sex of your hero -- two of the classes are male, two female. It's all kept very simple, and that's not something you would settle for in an action-RPG if it wasn't on a handheld. Even then, you're dying for more -- if you're going to play friends over a wireless connection, you want your own character to be distinct on the screen, and there just aren't enough options to go around. The simplified character creation system pegs this game as a console adventure slimmed down to go on a portable. Continuing on, you keep hitting on little problems that wouldn't have been an issue if they had just been treated bigger. There are some cool minibosses, but most are just super-versions of previous enemies -- bigger skeletons, magic-casting pig creatures, fog-dragging shadow spiders, and sometimes just glowing brutes with almost no effects at all to make them different. They're all given names, but are rarely given personality to match.
The storytelling in Untold Legends is a bare-bones presentation of the text as you encounter it. There are no cutscenes to help tell the tale, no voiceovers to humanize the characters, and even the intro sequence is a text crawl on a scant few still screens. You're lucky if you are even able to get a swell out of the music at dramatic turning points. It doesn't help that the dialog, particularly in the beginning, is handled with awkward scripting. Instead of popping up little messages to teach you the controls (or weaving button commands into the dialog ala Metal Gear), this game simply sticks lines on the tail end of a conversation. "Guardian, the Overpowering Evil are storming the castle! [PRESS SELECT TO VIEW INVENTORY.]" There is this entire hub city of Aven, but all of the doors (save one, the tavern) are locked from exploring, and there are no random villagers populating the city you are trying so desperately to save. The half-dozen people you do meet are always in the same place throughout the game -- they change their dialog as you come back to see them over time, but you'd think they'd have better things to do than just stand in one spot and wait for over 20 hours for you to come to their rescue.
This is old-school RPG design, and it totally breaks the illusion that Aven is a real place that needs your help. That's too bad, because deeper in the game, the story starts to come into its own. People from the outskirts seem to hate your guts, and as you are working to save the once glorious city, you come to find that your desperate town deserves its fate for becoming a home to slovenly, haughty city folk in an ancient world that could have used some hand-me-down help. You yourself are just a drifter who came here to win a tournament, then crashed out in the town's tavern and partied it up without a care for your duties. This is how the legend of the Brotherhood of the Blade (an ancient order of guardians) became lost to time, and now the people are paying for it until you can find the tomes they hid at the corners of the globe that can stop this eminent evil. And since human greed and sloth has caused this weakening, might there also be a human hand exploiting this to harness the darkness for their own purposes? Good stuff, perfect fodder for an RPG voyage ... and yet, so little of it sinks in because the storytelling isn't given budget or focus to come to life.
Some of these same complaints of simplicity can also be leveled against the game design as well. It's not as clear in these cases if the problems came from the rush-job for getting Untold Legends out for PSP at launch, or if the game's budget was significantly smaller than a similar console effort, or if there just wasn't that same high level of production that we're used to. For one, while this game isn't meant to be Champions of Norrath on PSP (and wasn't done by the same team), you can't help but compare and notice the little things this PSP game is missing. There's a lot less stuff to smash here. You don't catch fire when you get too close to a torch or run over a flame. There's not even that rippley water effect. That's little stuff, and maybe it's not exactly gameplay, but it would have helped set the stage and ease players into the world if it had been done.
Stage design is expansive, but deceptively plain. All of the stages are built out of simple blocks -- square rooms and rectangular corridors with nothing but 90 degree lefts and rights branching off the paths. It's great for the replay value that you can go back and get into the game again to play through randomly-generated dungeon areas, but it's hard to be impressed by a world made out of right angles any way you make it. We also found a lot fewer side-quests to make use of those random dungeons and 100-stage maps than we expected. Along our first journey through, only a handful of quests came up that were not required, and some of them still had to be taken up because you don't always have a clear idea of what land a quest is supposed to start in until you have found the connector stage to it in another journey. (A mission through a secret catacomb may send you into a mine tunnel, and that may emerge in the forest you had no clue how to find before.) The great majority of quests ahead of you are fetch/slaughter quests, and you can count on a couple of fingers the number of puzzles (if you count opening every treasure chest in a level until you find the key a "puzzle") this game holds.
Then there is the inventory collection system, which is far too friendly on hoard pigs. Enemies drop weapons and special items like slot machines, showering you with so much stuff that we almost never had a need to visit the shopkeeper in town. Unless you need to stock up on health and power potions, you probably don't need to bother collecting gold after a few level increases. SOE added an intriguing weapon/armor notching system, where you can attach magic gems and runes to your gear to give them various special powers. Unfortunately, that system becomes moot quickly, because a lot of the stuff you pick up (especially the special stuff you get for completing a quest) come already enchanted. There aren't enough powers in the magic pegs to make weapons and armor you could buy better than the special items you are gifted with, and so many of the big weapons require high character levels to be able to use anyway. We were never particularly stuck in need of a great, big weapon anyway. The AI is constantly balancing itself to even out the challenge, which took some of the high out of leveling up. Going out and playing stages over and over to get a high-ranking character if you can't beat a section of the game isn't a great idea, because that area will be harder when you come back anyway. You do get new skills throughout, however, and all of those special abilities are fun to play with and add a ton of gameplay ability to this title.
In terms of its technical qualities, Untold Legends impresses with its best features, and leaves its lesser qualities for you to hopefully ignore. The visual construction of Aven and this sprawling land called Unataca is handled well, with detailed textures and detailed character models. Top-down views like this occasionally get a bit of motion blur from the PSP screen (especially since everything comes in and out of razor-sharp focus since you are moving and stopping so often), but details are still rich and detailed even when things get heated. The focus clearly was on the combat, as the enemy figures are every nightmare come true on a 4.3" screen. Every new area yields a creature or two that astounds -- watch the giant bat / man creatures wrap their bodies in their wings when they block and just try to stop yourself from gawking.
All of this comes expensive in the loadtime department -- sometimes in the range of 30 seconds, which is especially frustrating since everything has to reload again if you die mid-stage. Randomly-generated worlds shouldn't need to be reloaded so much, or even be so hard to load up the first time in. And as far as this game's music ... it seemed designed to be turned off or tuned out while you play in crowded areas. These musical tracks sound like they're off a Casio keyboard, planging away constant loops and occasionally cutting off completely to reload the track. If it was interactive music, we could deal with the lo-fi orchestration, but these are pre-recorded duds -- the only thing we can think here is that the team spent all of its budget making the game fun and wasn't concerned for what the soundtrack was (which would be a good call, as we played a lot of the game without our earphones on anyway.) Better off are the sound effects. The shrill death rattles of various creatures (particularly the freaky shrieks of slain ghosts) ring out with lots of character, and there are nice touches like sounds for leaky pipes and running water that fade in and out in stereo as you explore a stage.
Finally, there is the wireless multiplayer mode. The set-up is awesome -- any player can take his created character and host a multiplayer adventure for up to four champions to journey together. The balancing can be brutal if players have wildly different skill levels, since the enemies will all be tuned for the best player, but this is where teamwork and smart play factor in. Each player is able to go anywhere on a given stage since you all have your own PSP screen (everybody must be on the same stage, and must agree to change stages), but you will want to work together to get through the levels if everybody is to make it out alive and with lots of experience points. The entire story can be worked through in multiplayer, either all the way through or else continuing from the progress the host player has made.
It's a good way to spend your day, but it falls just short of high caliber multiplayer you've seen in console action-RPGs. For one, it's only available for local wireless play (although brave souls should give WiFi tunneling a try.) It's strange that Sony Online Entertainment is launching a game for an online system, but not including online play. You can't fault them for not cramming this mode in (the PSP is so new that most developers don't even know how to program online WiFi yet, and without mics or a good chat system, Untold Legends might not have worked well even if it had the feature. We are NOT grading the game down for missing the feature.) However, some PSP gamers will still have issues that it's not there (unless they know how to tunnel from home). Then you have the complications of the gameplay that are missing. There's not a lot of new space to explore since there are not secret areas or puzzles to unlock, and you lose some of the strategic challenge of needing to work together to not get pushed back into a fire or caught in an exploding barrel blast. It's a basic slash-and-cast experience, whether you go it alone or with friends, and it's made more fun with multiplayer, but not necessarily more deep or enriching.
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